Riley Hunt

If I were to touch up anything, I would update the android controller to work with colliders so I can have the audio play when the player touches the objects. If I could do that then I would implement it in the PC build too.

I also liked the idea of over dubbing the audio with my own voice to make an eery cyborg-sounding voice that symbolizes the fusion of tech and the oral tradition.

4/28/15

I spent today converting my interviews into audio and placing them. I’ve also been touching up the game in general.

4/15/15

Today I made a presentation to my old high school, the Waring School on Our project and augmented reality in general. It was very fruitful, it seemed like everyone had an opinion on the subject and wanted to have their voice heard. One of my old professors in particular was particularly unsettled by it and agreed to be interviewed on the subject.

He did make an interesting analogy to St. Augustine’s attempt to find God in his own memory which i thought was interesting, as humanist myself, i found the idea very similar to my personal belief that technology is the mirror in which human nature is revealed, that technological progress is dependent on needs, and those needs tell us a lot about ourselves as a society and as a species. I look forward to his addition to the project, as well as other old teachers of mine that I’ve contacted.

I’m going to email him and ask some of his students to write me some of their impressions and thoughts about the meeting and i’ll record them myself and put them in the game to represent the voice of younger generations.

1st Post

Here is a new human model using 123d catch, i was hoping the high contrast of the backdrop would create accurate finger models but the cold made standing still difficult and there wasn’t much space to make the model outside with good lighting. I’ve been experimenting with turning off HDR on the camera settings, hoping the the uniformity of the camera apeture would decrease the inaccuracies associated with 123d Catch. If the model finger turn out to be unworkable I’m considering wearing mittens for the next one.

and the finished project:

This Capture didn’t go as well as I hoped, mostly due to the high contrast i believe, and the lack of space to comfortably make a circle. In terms of capturing technique, I believe that a rope and chalk might help amateurs create accurate captures with relative ease. I’ve been toying the HDR setting because I believe that if the cameras were calibrated correctly a pair of photographers could do very accurate captures in half the time, by circling in tandem, and the cameras would have the same resolution, light scale and exposure to quickly create good models on the street. This setup might also require rolling stands to make sure the high was consistent and uniform. However depending on the availability of Project Tango this method might become obsolete very soon.

In terms of themes for my project I’ve been researching the La Brea Tar Pits, which contained a dazzling array of preserved creature, but that might be a project more in Wes’s area of expertise.

I’m also interested in the overall themes of the cost of progress, perhaps in relation to The 20th century American concept of “Manifest Destiny” the belief that America had a right to stretch from the Atlantis to the Specific. In many ways, California is the end whereas Massachusetts is the beginning of that journey. This coupled with the horrific losses of the Indigenous Culture could be an interesting Allegory to the idea of intellectual progress in the Digital Age. What do we leave behind when we choose Virtual Reality instead of Reality? I got this idea in a Gaming class where I proposed a version of Oregon Trail where you play as the Indigenous peoples as they are slowly exterminated by western expansion.

I’ve also been considering creating an Augmented Reality version of Schizophrenia, where voices speak in your headphones and eventually the line between reality and virtual reality becomes increasingly blurred.

I took this capture of a bird I though had frozen and had been preserved by ice, but it started moving at the end of the capture, and let it inside after, hoping it would warm up enough to recover.

The capture think came out very well and it symbolized the loss of mobility I felt during the snowstorms.

Marker Tracking AR

Try it out!

3/4/15

HostMonster Implementation/Geotagging Take 2

Purchase domain at Hostmonster.com

I hope it’s not all at once, I’d like to eat this month

Domain name is technicallynotreal.com

Download all Augmented_Reality_Assets from the walk-though to my External Hard Drive. Just copy and paste from the google drive link.

Create an FTP Account

Connect Via Windows of FileZilla or Cyberduck to the web domain.

3/18/15

(Using Cyberduck)

Double click the file and then login and you will get access

Daqri Test

I’ve been revising my Memory palace from last semester, hoping that perhaps I can make a scavenger hunt for images, making an odd virtual reality scavenger hunt. I’m currently researching the capability of unity in creating a mobile game via a url instead of a download, perhaps some fusion of the web player and mobile browser resources can help me achieve this.

3/25/15

I agreed to do a presentation at my high school in Beverly to get attention for our project

I’m working on trying to export unity 5 to android. Because of my lack of progress in geo-tagging I’ve decided to rely on virtual reality instead of augmented for the time being, creating the scene in unity so that i could, later down the line potentially export it to layer. Since Wes also expressed interest in exporting to android, i figure it’s wiser to concentrate on that and worry about geo-tagging as a stretch goal.

Since i’m using a new laptop and a new version of Unity I’m trying to update the memory palace project to create the Manifest Digital Scene. If I can;t get this to work by the end of the day i’m going to try and run the older version of unity at school and see if i can just use the old scene to create the new one. I’ve also been compiling tutorials for the creation of features in the virtual scene, such as a floor and skybox that are split down the middle.

4/1/15

Today I’m testing to see if my project from last year still works. If it does, I can move forward in creating the Manifest Digital Memory palace.

Update:

I have now gotten both my laptop and my old project to work, allowing me to use the newer version of unity.

This, coupled with with my purchase of new USB cable, will allow me to finally get my hard drive and phone working with my laptop for the first time.

Now i’ve got the basics down, all i need to do is create the unity Scene itself, Create a daqri image to link to the apk on dropbox and the project will be done.

After a fruitful visit to my childhood home i found many objects dating from the period of westward expansion, or with symbolic value and took photogrammetry of them.

This is the old box I chose.

and the objs

afterwards I followed the workflow from my last memory palace to place it in Unity.

Since I’m using a different version, finding the Embed Media is a little differnt. It is critical step for getting the textures to work. It can be found in File type specific options>embed media. I recommend checking and then saving the preset as “OBJexporter” or something like it and using it for all subsequent exports.

these are the images for some of the other objects.

4/8/15

I’ve now updated my Marker image with the new version of the memory palace. I’ve also calibrated the Audio Sources to work correctly with the ambient sound. Here are some pic of the scene so far.